A Journey Through the Fire: Reworded

My introduction to the world was defined by a father whose presence was a volatile landscape of "ups and downs." In those early years, safety was a vapor—a mist that appeared briefly only to be burned away by the heat of his temper. When my mother finally secured our legal freedom from his guardianship, I believed the "Sound" of that victory was the end of the battle. I did not yet realize that the internal baseline for "home" had already been set to a frequency of unsafety.